Madrona Road Challenge Quilt

I completed my Madrona Road Challenge Quilt for the Modern Quilt Guild last night in order to meet today’s contest deadline!  Here is the finished product!  This fabric is Madrona Road by Violet Craft for Michael Miller and I found it delightful to work with.

I thought it might be interesting to follow my design process for this quilt. I started with perusing Pinterest – another favorite pasttime.  I came across this interesting table with a geometric design and thought it would be a great quilt design.  Here’s the photo.

I took the basic idea of the geometric pattern of the table and transferred it to graph paper adding my own tweaks to come up with the quilt design.

When our Santa Barbara Modern Quilt Guild received our fabric from The Modern Guild, we chose to divide it into fat eighths so we each had all the prints we received rather than fat quarters of only 3. I supplemented by Madrona Road by ordering Farmstead in Robin’s Egg, Broken Herringbone in blue and Haystack in Slate from Hawthorne Threads.  I wanted to use the adorable Farmstead print for the back and was able to fussy cut some barns and trucks in some of the strips.  I used Essex Linen for the neutral.

I cut all of my fat eighths into 2 1/2 inch strips. I made strip sets alternating the Madrona Road with the linen.  I subcut the strip sets into 2 1/2 inch strips in order to get the square pattern on the bottom right of the quilt.

I used my graph paper design as a rough pattern but didn’t use the measurements as I was challenged by the length of the strips I had to use.   I knew I wanted to make the triangles by piecing a square and cutting it corner to corner both ways to get the direction of the strips.  I was limited to create the 2 squares 19 x 19 because that was the length of the strips I had to work with from the fat eighths.  That definitely skewed the math on the actual design but the concept was the same so I just went with it.

You can see that the triangles on the bottom and left, are formed with the strips moving from the center down.  You only get two triangles from each square that will work that way.  The triangle at the top uses the remaining triangles from one of the squares and it forms a different pattern.  It adds nice variety but totally accidental!

In constructing the quilt, I started with the left panel and both of the straight sections use all 2 1/2 inch strips – some horizontal and some vertical.  I wanted to use varying widths for the center section and could accommodate the longer length of strips using the additional yardage I purchased and using my fat eighth strips for the ends where they fit. I ended up using varying widths for the right section as well.  There were a few “y” seams in the final assembly which can test your patience but totally doable.

So now that the top is done and I used the Farmstead and Broken Herringbone for the back, basted it and got ready for the free motion quilting.  I am a novice at free motion quilting.  I typically send my larger quilt tops out to Heidi at Rocky Mountain Quilting for her long arm magic.  But I am honing my skills and trying to do more and more of my own quilting on smaller projects.

I started with my walking foot and stitched in the ditch to anchor down the various sections.

I wanted to try different patterns in the different sections so I started with bubbles or circles in the linen in the large section on the right.

I did some straight line quilting in several sections and also tried some other patterns that I found in Angela Walter’s book, Free Motion Quilting and Natalia Bonner’s book, A Beginner’s Guilde to Free Motion Quilting.  There were several patterns in both books that I wanted to try but with no time to practice, I stuck with the ones I found easiest!  Take a peak at these photos.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I used a wavy or curvy line to quote the section of 2″ squares on the right.

So here is the final quilt – bound with the Haystack print in slate and ready to go!  I think I REALLY like this one!

I made the deadline for the Modern Guild contest by loading my photo into this Flickr goup. Michael Miller will select their favorites for their booth at QuiltCon.  Regardless of the outcome, this quilt was a wonderful challenge – especially with such a short fuse – 15 days start to finish and having to order fabric and work full time!

Be sure to go to the Flickr group to check out all the amazing projects made using this fabric.  Most of the members of our guild are making blocks that we will be assembling for a charity quilt. I’ll post the photos when it is complete.

Thanks for checking in.  I’m linking to Crazy Mom Quilts and Sew Many Ways.

Irelle